34. Human Rights Without the Human Good A Reply to Jiwei Ci 35. Care and Human Rights推荐.pdf

34 Human Rights Without the Human Good? A Reply to Jiwei Ci Simon Hope Bernard Williams, in his magisterial discussion of Ancient Greek attitudes to slavery, observes that [i]n many comparisons between the ancient and the modern world it is assumed that in the ancient world social roles were understood to be rooted in nature. Indeed, it is often thought to be a special mark of modern societies, distinguishing them from earlier ones, that they have lost this idea . . . A central feature of modern liberal con- ceptions of social justice can indeed be expressed by saying that they altogether deny the existence of necessary social identities.1 Williams is undoubtedly correct about this; as he is about the fact that the ‘intellectual machinery’ by which the point can be expressed is itself distinctly modern, and about the need to guard against making this contrast the sole lynchpin on which our under- standing of distant social moralities hangs. Williams’s point makes it well worth ask- ing: what has the history of liberal thought proposed to replace notions of necessary social identity with, and how do those proposals relate to other elements of modern liberalism? For Jiwei Ci, answers to these questions expose some crippling deficiencies in our thinking about human rights. Ci’s specific target is liberty rights, about which he advances two critical theses: 1. ‘[l]iberty rights, no matter how justified, cannot be justified as human rights.’2 2. ‘liberty rights as understood in the standard way are too weak as liberal rights, and this is shown by a contradiction within the liberal approach to liberty rights in a liberal society.’3 In the first half (roughly speaking) of this paper I shall argue that neither of these the- ses should be accepted. Nonetheless—and this forms my paper’s second half